In Little Noah’s Honor, Sensible Gun Legislation

(Corrects number of shots in second paragraph, and updates
seventh and 14th paragraphs to clarify that the memorandum does
not represent the views of all family members, in a column
published Jan. 22, 2013.)

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- When I saw Alexis Haller last week,
he looked much as I remembered him from college: just more
tired, and a lot sadder. It wasn’t the reunion either of us
would have wanted.

His nephew, 6-year-old Noah Pozner, was among the murdered
at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He had been shot several times
at close range. My old friend had come from Seattle to
Washington to talk to lawmakers about reforms that might prevent
future massacres.

He had sent a memorandum to the White House task force on
gun violence on behalf of Noah’s mother, brother, sister and
seven other family members. It included a number of novel
proposals. One is a new reporting requirement: If you have
“knowledge of a grave and imminent threat of serious physical
harm” that someone else has made, and “reasonable cause to
believe” that person has access to a gun or bomb, you would
have a legal requirement to inform a law-enforcement agency.

As you may be able to tell, Haller is a lawyer. He points
out that 18 states require any person who suspects that child
abuse or neglect is going on to notify the authorities. There’s
no reason in principle, he argues, to say that a legal
obligation should exist in those cases but not when you have
reason to believe that someone plans to shoot up a school.

In the memo, not making the call would be a misdemeanor
with a penalty of as much as six months of confinement. Again,
though, Haller draws a parallel to the child-abuse reporting
requirement: People are rarely prosecuted for not observing it.
The laws have, nonetheless, helped to shape a valuable norm.

Mental Illness

A second proposed statute would establish a standard for
securing firearms. Someone who has “reasonable cause to
believe” that he has made a gun accessible to a person who is
mentally ill and considered dangerous, or otherwise poses a
grave and imminent danger to others, would be guilty of a
misdemeanor, and maybe even a felony, if that dangerous person
gets the gun.

The memo also proposes that the government fund school-security reviews and upgrades, and augment emergency grief
counseling. (“After Noah’s death,” it says, “family members
underwent an initial extended and horrible period without any
mental health assistance.”) The memo credits lockdown
procedures for saving Noah’s sisters, and urges schools to do
mandatory lockdown drills.

These proposals are carefully and narrowly drawn. Haller
notes that it wouldn’t be a crime, for example, to allow someone
who is merely depressed to have access to your gun. If that
person were depressed and torturing animals, on the other hand,
the reasonable-cause threshold might be met.

Haller is staying out of the fight over the assault-weapons
ban, which he fears will achieve nothing because it polarizes
Congress and excludes so many kinds of guns. He developed his
ideas in consultation with school-security and law-enforcement
professionals. He also drew on a federal report issued after the
1999 Columbine High School shootings, which found that targeted
violence at schools rarely results from sudden impulses and that
others usually have some idea of the attacker’s plans. The
reporting requirement is designed to increase the chances that
information gets to the authorities.

The proposals don’t restrict the rights of responsible gun
owners, and they aren’t attacks on gun culture. Instead, they
seek to strengthen norms -- like the norm that firearms should
be secured -- that are already present in that culture. So they
are more politically viable than most gun-control proposals, and
more likely to achieve practical success, as well.

At the same time, they don’t follow the template of the
National Rifle Association. They don’t assume, that is, that the
only solution to the problems caused by bad people with guns is
good people with guns.

There is room for debate about what level of government
should put these reforms in place. Haller points out that in a
time when kids could be reading disturbing messages from chat-room friends across the country, it might make sense to have a
national hot line where such instances could be reported --
especially if threat-assessment experts were available there.

Disconnected Discussion

One maddening feature of the gun debate since the Sandy
Hook massacre is how disconnected the public discussion has been
from what actually happened there. So many proposals would have
changed nothing even if they had been implemented. It seems much
more plausible that the ideas in Haller’s memo might have made a
difference at Sandy Hook or Columbine or Virginia Tech.

And this constructive response to grief and horror should
fill us all with awe.

(Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist, a visiting
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor
at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own.)